We're all familiar with the problems with the February, April, and on releases of the DX9 SDK for the D3DX dll's. My question is whether or not a work-around for users has come up? Currently, I'm having players download the Redistributable file which ranks in at around 29 MB or so, if memory serves. Is there a better way to do this? I'll be submitting my game to the GDC Student Showcase here shortly; I am confident their judges probably already have the latest release installed... but it'd be really unfortunate to have a game thrown out simply because they didn't! Is there any way I can streamline this process for users? -dbh

The June SDK included updates such that you can (legally) distribute the d3dx9_xx.dll files in a stand-alone setup program. I think it weighed in at a few hundred kilobytes. Making downloadable game sizes much more favourable.

You can then get the end-user to download the basic 9.0c runtime from Microsoft.com (or hope they use windows update) and that should sort everything out.

You have to find a way to distribute the appropriate D3DX DLL for your application. If another program already installed it (e.g. they have a copy) then consider yourself lucky. Don't expect the D3DX libraries to be appearing on Microsoft/Windows update anytime soon.

I understand that another (backup) option is in the pipeline from the DX team that sounds very promising. Watch out in future SDK releases to see if/what that turns out to be [wink]

hth
Jack

Jack,

I found the small installers (just over a meg, it looks like) for the DLL I need (I'm using April 2005 SDK, so I need 25.dll).

What I'm currently doing is providing my beta for download as well as a link to the DLL installer (with a note to install that if you have the DLL errors).

Is there something else I should be doing? I still get posts from various individuals who claim "your game is broken, I get this error about a DLL" even when in BIG BOLD PRINT, it says RIGHT BELOW THE DOWNLOAD LINK what to do when you encounter that :D

So I'm doing everything I can then?

-dbh

Quote:Original post by dbh
What I'm currently doing is providing my beta for download as well as a link to the DLL installer (with a note to install that if you have the DLL errors).

Sounds okay to me. For a final release, "good practice" should be to include the runtime redistributable that works for your binary and ALWAYS run DSetup during installation. You're not supposed to put a "click here to install DX" part in anymore as the DSetup module is intended to return quickly/quietly if it has no work to do.

Quote:Original post by dbh
I still get posts from various individuals who claim "your game is broken, I get this error about a DLL" even when in BIG BOLD PRINT, it says RIGHT BELOW THE DOWNLOAD LINK what to do when you encounter that :D

Sadly there is nothing new here. People don't always read the documentation.

If you're really bothered about it, you might want to look at delayed loading of D3DX (not entirely sure of the finer points of this). Using LoadLibrary() from the Win32 library should give your application a chance to produce a "friendly" error.

hth
Jack

Sounds great, thanks for the insight guys! I'll consider it and think about my options.

-dbh